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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: ROBERSON@***.EDU
Subject: Copyrights (Again!)
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 93 05:47:48 CET
Tyger asked what he should do if he sees his adventure published by FASA with
someone else's name on it.
It all depends on how closely the adventure follows your own and whether
you can prove the author had the opportunity to copy your idea. That means
having a hardcopy and being able to prove that you had the document by a
certaindate, so they don't think you wrote it up afterwards. The easiest way to
do this
is to print it out and mail it to yourself and DO NOT OPEN IT. Then, when it
comes to the court, you can show them the postmark date before opening it to
reveal your work.

However, if you just notice certain similarities (an interesting NPC, a quirky
situation or device) and the rest of the adventure is not like yours at all,
you're probably out of luck. As I've said before, work is copyrightable but
ideas aren't.

J Roberson
Message no. 2
From: "Robert A. Hayden" <hayden@*******.MANKATO.MSUS.EDU>
Subject: Copyrights (again)
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 14:43:05 -0500
I would like to bring this topic up in misc.legal (probably next week).

What I would like to do is to get about three or four Shadowtk
participants to do three things:

1) Write up a good summary of your position and why you feel that way. I
want to use this summary as part of the introduction of the topic on
misc.legal.

2) Follow the misc.legal discussion.

3) use that discussion to work with me to come up with a couple of good
proposals about how to handle all of this so that we can propose them to
ShadowTalk.

---

If you are interested in being on the "exploratory" team, please contact
me. I am not going to be able to take everybody (obviously) and will base
my choices on both order of replying and amount of participation on
ShadowTalk.

Thanks y'all.

[> Robert Hayden ____ <] Black Holes result from God
[> \ /__ <] dividing the universe by zero.
[> hayden@*******.mankato.msus.edu \/ / <]
[> aq650@****.INS.CWRU.Edu \/ <] # include std_disclaimer.h

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Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.